We are all witnesses and participants in the English expression: “May you live in interesting times.”

Eighteen months ago, who could have anticipated the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought an immediate shift for many people to work remotely. During this time, organizations hired many people who had not yet stepped into the office building of their new employer. Also, many new hires have not yet met their manager or coworkers – except through virtual meetings. As a result, many people are eager to get back to the office, meet new and returning coworkers, and reconnect with the aspects of organizational culture that come alive through onsite and in-person interactions.

In contrast, while leaders are preparing to bring people back to the office under a new hybrid onsite/remote model, many people have reservations about returning. These employees voice concerns that they should be able to continue to work remotely and not be required to give up the flexibility and work/life balance they gained over the past 18 months.

To add to this challenge, people are changing jobs at a rate never seen before. According to US Labor statistics, four million people quit their jobs in July – and more are considering changing jobs with record low unemployment at 5.2% in September. Plus, LinkedIn reported that the number of remote jobs posted on their site increased 8.5 times compared with pre-pandemic.

All these dynamics are creating what is known as the “hybrid paradox” amid the “great reshuffle.”

As people seek remote work and greater flexibility, how can leaders guide their teams through the turbulence of the interesting times we live and work? We believe it’s through change management.

On October 27^th, I will host a webinar with BrainStorm, a provider of technology solutions that help increase user adoption. Here is what you’ll learn:

• How to accelerate and revitalize new-hire onboarding
• How to improve access to training and skills development
• How to invest in new technologies that support business operations
• Tips for deploying employee experience analytics

We Don’t Like Change

For me, and for a lot of people, when you have to make a change in your daily routine it isn’t welcomed with open arms.  I think it is human nature to find an excuse to get out of making a change, even if that change will help you.  I mean, how many diets fail because people are just stuck in the routine of fast food and TV vs healthy eating and exercise?  So if changes to living healthier are ignored, it should be no surprise that the adoption of new technology in an organization can be a struggle.

Well, I can’t help you shed any extra pounds or help you stop smoking, but I can help you with your technology adoption rates.  Domo is the operating system for your business.  In being the platform for your information they also give you clarity and insight into what is going on inside of it.  If you use Domo now, you should be familiar with the AppStore already.  That is the location where you can download pre-built dashboards for your instance of Domo.

For The People

Domo recently has released an update to its Domostats-People app.  The previous version was great because it gave you insight into what was going on.  Also having access to the user data allowed you to customize cards for your needs.  But out of the box, it wasn’t using Domo Stories, the awesome new look they are giving to dashboards.

The Users Tell The Story

But now, the new version has Domo Stories built-in and shows you a more complete story around your user activity inside of Domo, with a fresh new look.

The first thing you need to know when working on fostering adoption is who your users are.  The first section out of the box gives you that answer immediately.  From giving you the Domo Role they are in, to the Department they are assigned to in the organization.  This gives you a complete understanding of who is using Domo.

The next section allows you to see when users are using Domo and how often they are using it.  It doesn’t do you a lot of good to know just the first time someone logged in.  You need to know when they logged in last and how active people are in the system.  Now, with Domo, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing to NOT log in because Domo sends a lot of Data out to users too, so keep that in mind while you are using these stats.

And for this last section, what users are actively engaged in your Domo instance.  This looks at who is creating content for you like building cards or importing data.  It also shows you how active each role is so you can see if you may need to revise the roles.

Free Advice

Keep in mind, what I’m showing you here is out of the box and we’re just looking at sample user data.  There are a few quick customizations I’d recommend you make.  One is to create some cards (the visualizations) for role-specific login activity.  You may want to set an alert that notifies you if an Admin hasn’t logged for X amount of days.  If that is the case, maybe that person doesn’t need Admin rights and you can downgrade them.  You can also set up a card to show you who has recently had their role in Domo escalated.  Knowing that may help you keep an eye on their activity, or for you to reach out to, so you can help answer any new questions that they may have.  Another one that I like is adding a card for new employees.  Keep a ‘welcome’ section on a company-wide page so people can see who is new so they can send their ‘welcome aboard’ emails directly instead of blasting them to everyone in the company.

As a Domo partner, Perficient is well equipped to handle your Domo needs and any questions you may have.  We have rolled out lots of technology with lots of different companies, so technology adoption is old hat for us.   Let me know what you think of this new app from Domo by leaving a comment or reaching out to me directly.

In today’s diverse working environment, organizations face a challenge of providing systems that cater to a diverse audience. We’ve previously discussed this trend in our series of blog posts, “Anatomy of a Modern Intranet”. By 2020, there will be five generations active in the workplace. All with different work styles and comfort with technology solutions. It is vitally important to understand these differing audiences in order to engage users and drive adoption. Understanding our audience allows us to cater to their individuality and create an inclusive user experience. We thought it would be fun to examine some personality types that you will encounter on your journey to a modern intranet or digital workplace.

Here are four personality types for the modern intranet:

The individuals depicted here are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons within your organization is purely intentional.

1. Newspaper and Coffee Browser
There is something about sipping a cup of coffee and flipping through the newspaper that can be incredibly relaxing. Likewise, many of your users will feel similarly about your intranet. They will take the opportunity to read the latest news and information over their morning cup of “joe”. For this group, the focus is on building a portal that provides a positive user experience.

For these users, it is important to have a continuous stream of fresh and interesting content to peruse. Make content engaging with the inclusion of photos and video media. This will create a compelling experience that will bring these users back for more.

2. Catch me if you can
There will be subsets of your user population that will resist every effort to lure them to the intranet, perhaps missing vital information in the process. For these users, it may be necessary to leverage a multi-channel communication approach. Engage this user base through email newsletters, push notifications, and even offline methods such as posters and elevator message boards.

To convert these users it is important that your additional communication channels validate the intranet as a source of reliable information. Over time, these users will become accustomed to seeking information directly from the source.

3. Social Butterfly
The social butterfly values the ability to participate in a conversation as an active participant over a one-sided content delivery system. These users provide comments and feedback and often share your message with others in their circles.

Engage these users by enabling them to leave comments and feedback, as well as inviting them to rate and share content. Every organization has social butterflies, if your technology is not enabling this set of users, you are likely missing valuable organizational insights.

4. Just the facts
These users have many demands on their time and attention. Rather than browsing and discovering new content, they wish to find answers to their specific questions. These users are more likely to use search over navigation to find the content they seek. They appreciate content that is organized logically and the power of a good summary. They will spend less time on the site, therefore the time they do spend should be productive.

To appeal to these users, you’ll want to spend time honing your site’s navigation and search experiences. The site navigation should be logical and easily understood by the majority of users. Task-based menu approaches are more effective than menus that follow strict organizational hierarchies. Focus on providing an excellent search experience and curation of search results for commonly used search terms.

Impossible to please everyone

In designing your modern intranet experience, it is impossible to please everyone. Focusing on your users and the trends of how your users and organization are changing will provide valuable insights on how to reach your audience effectively. The realization that there will be many types of users and a variety of engagement styles will allow you to focus on the strategies that work better within your organization.

Perficient, modern workplace partner

At Perficient, we are experts in the modern workplace, building intranet and digital workplace solutions that enable users to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Our modern intranet and portal solution, Rise is purpose-built to deliver engaging user experiences on the Office 365 platform. Our blend of enterprise software solutions along with expert consulting services allow our customers to achieve long-term success. If you are interested in learning more about how Perficient can help you modernize your intranet, reach out to us today.

“How will the change affect me personally?”   This is the first question that people want answered as soon as they learn about upcoming plans for a large organizational change. However, at the early stages of preparing for organizational change, leaders are not able to give specific answers to these questions. This concept, known as the Cone of Uncertainty, is found in many industries including software development, project management, construction and risk management.

To a software development team, the Cone of Uncertainty describes how the amount of uncertainty evolves over time as the team moves through their phases of technology change. These activities include gathering business requirements in the Inception phase and creating a baseline functional and user interface and technical architecture in the Elaboration phase. In the Construction phase, a fully functioning solution is developed and delivered and data is migrated in the Transition phase.

As the chart illustrates below, the level of uncertainty decreases as the team gathers research and makes decisions through each phase. From a project management perspective, the Cone of Uncertainty illustrates the challenge to accurately estimate and manage the project when estimates at the beginning of the project can be a factor of 4x both on the high and low side of the actual effort required.

For leaders who are responsible to lead their organizations through change, an understanding of the Cone of Uncertainty is extremely important. When leaders announce a new vision and strategic direction that requires significant change, they must have a clear vision of the desired future state. However, details on how groups and individuals will get there, the exact timeline, and financial and people resources required are less clear. As a result, people start to feel anxious, get distracted by all the unknowns, and become less productive as they wait for the fog of uncertainty to clear.

To address these normal and expected reactions to change, leaders can take specific actions to mitigate the high uncertainty and guide people through the Cone of Certainty and Adoption© to increase readiness for the change. This cone is a mirror image of the Cone of Uncertainty, but increases at the same time that the Cone of Uncertainty decreases. Actions that help people’s certainty begin to evolve include senior leaders answering the question of “why change – why now” during the Define Change phase. During the Communicate Change phase, leaders engage with employees to discuss the “who, what, and when” so that as high-level plans are brought down to the local level, leaders identify specific training and communication needs. This information allows leaders to determine the “how” and details about how the change can be communicated through a variety of channels and mediums during the Enable Change phase. After the change is launched, leaders take actions in the Sustain Change phase to ensure certainty for the change reaches the maximum level. This happens as leaders support people in their new processes, tools, and behaviors while monitoring key metrics and ensuring the changes are adopted, reinforced, and become woven into the culture of the organization. The chart below illustrates how following these activities help increase certainty and adoption as people move through the phases of organizational change.

When we bring both charts together below, we see the obvious overlap and increase of each cone as opposite cone decreases through the phases of two types of change. However, decreasing the size of the Cone of Uncertainty based on a change in technology is relatively easier and more predictable than moving people through the Cone of Certainty and Adoption© for an organizational change. This is true regardless of a change from a merger, new business strategy, or new technology platform. Unlike computer hardware and software, people do not automatically move through these phases – but instead take steps of progress when they feel psychologically safe and supported.

As a result, leaders need to give equal – if not more attention – to specific actions they will take to help people through the phases of organizational change so that decreases in the degrees of certainty and adoption happen at a planned and steady pace. Often, people involved in planning and carrying out the technology change are also impacted. This underscores the need for leaders to engage with and involve these groups in the planning and activities to carry out the organizational change. By taking these actions at the beginning of your organization change initiative, people will be more aware of the big picture and the purpose of the change, more understanding of the timing when more details on how the change will impacted them personally, and more supportive as they are engaged in the planning and adoption of the change.

Focus On the People Not Just the System

When implementing a new system such as Salesforce, regardless of an organization’s project management methodology (waterfall, agile or a hybrid), the approach is usually taken with the “lets get it done, can do” attitude. While this approach is helpful in completing the project on time and on budget, it can lend itself to a tunnel vision, system focused implementation: Design > Build > Train > Launch. Unfortunately, the often forgotten component is Change Management.

What I am referring to is not Change Management from the system and change control perspective but from the end-user “Human” perspective. As we all know, a successful Salesforce roll-out isn’t defined by project completion, success is defined by end-user adoption. The key to adoption is the “human” aspect of Change Management. Change Management should not be an afterthought, it should be at the forefront and the longest phase of a project that starts during the planning and continues through post-launch.

10 Tips to Change Management Success:

1. Identify an Owner/Responsible Person: Depending on the size of the project and number of impacted teams, it could require a dedicated resource. The role of this person is to be the Project Manager of Change Management.
2. Assemble a Change Management Team: This should include upper management, a representative from impacted groups, a training resource and most importantly end-users who will act as the change champions. In addition to assembling the team, ensure to meet on a regular basis to discuss any issues, open items, next steps and to ensure the team has a pulse on how things are progressing outside of the project team.
3. Call on Past Experience: Document pitfalls and successes during a previous system or process change rollouts. Nothing has more value than lessons learned. Organizations, especially end-users have a long memory when it comes to previous process changes. Avoiding previous pitfalls will prevent users from having the “here we go again” mentality.
4. Project Kick-off with End-users: Normal project kick-offs usually include key business stakeholders and the core project team. What is just as important is having a kick-off with the end-users. This kick-off will give you the opportunity to announce what change is coming, why you are making the change, impact of the change, and most importantly, how the change will benefit them. This will help build excitement, alignment and engagement as well as give the audience time to communicate any concerns early on.
5. Develop a Communication Plan with a Regular Cadence: Depending on the size and impact of a project, you may need different plans for different audiences. For example: There could be an organization-wide status update that only includes high-level timeline/road map with key accomplishments since the last communication and a separate communication to stakeholders. The most important communication is to the end-users and all teams that are impacted by the change. This end-user communication should come at regular intervals and give more detail in regards to project status, the feature road map, accomplishments, key dates and expected launch date.
6. Include End-users Throughout the Project: Give end-users a forum to ask questions, provide feedback and invite them to system demonstrations. These will help keep them engaged and reinforce that they are a part of driving the change and not just affected by it.
7. Provide Resource Materials: Salesforce could be new to many of the affected people and not knowing a system could lead to fear of change. To avoid this fear of not knowing, give people the resources and time to review them to build confidence. These resources could be as simple as quick reference guides so users can familiarize themselves with the terminology, links to existing Salesforce materials, or be as elaborate as a demo org where they can get hands-on and become familiar with the UI.
8. Open and Honest Communication: Do not hide information when it comes to project delays or possible negative impact. Finding out a day before the anticipated launch date that it has been pushed another month could be deflating to morale. Even worse is finding out the day of launch that a formally automated process will now be manual.
9. Publish the Training Plan Early: As part of regular communication, include training dates and format.  This will allow users to mentally prepare, plan their work to avoid scheduling conflicts, and give them time to complete any pre-training tasks or resource reviews.
10. Develop and Communicate a Launch and Post Launch Support Plan: As the launch dates approach it is likely that anxiety is growing.  What helps alleviate some anxiety and build confidence is to know end-users have support. With that in mind, develop a plan that lets them know how they will be supported if they have a questions, encounter any issues, how they can report the issues, and give them visibility to how those issues will be addressed.

There is no blanket approach for Change Management success since things need to scale up and down based on organizational needs. However, I do hope this post and these tips will get the necessary conversations started and keep the human aspect of Change Management in the forefront of any of your Salesforce projects.

Two-way communication is a key factor for gaining user adoption on the intranet and a great way to engage users and make your intranet more interactive is through the use of Quick Polls. Quick Polls are simple questions with multiple choice answers that users can answer quickly. Once a user has answered they get instant feedback on how others users have answered the question. Quick Polls can be a fun and informative way to solicit feedback from your audience.
 
Rise enables you to quickly and easily add a Quick Poll to any page in your intranet. Content managers have complete control over the Question and Answers available. Results are store in a SharePoint list and can be exported to Excel for easy review.
To learn more about other great Rise features, download our latest guide: Accelerate Your SharePoint Intranet with Rise.

If you want better user adoption – invest in your people.

Change management is the process of getting people ready, willing, and able to accept and embrace new ways of working. The focus is not just on looking at the differences and changes; it requires a logical answer to the foremost question on everyone’s minds: “What’s in it for me?” Ultimately, organizational change management is about building trust, listening, and helping users understand the value of a new product or service – for both them and the company. It’s about making the project real for users, preparing them for the change, and ultimately achieving or exceeding the target return on investment (ROI).

I have found some particularly eye-opening statistics about change management including the following from Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management report.

Of projects effectively applying change management:

• 94% met or exceeded project objectives
• 81% were at or under budget
• 71% were on or ahead of schedule

The success of your organization’s initiatives depend on your people so if you want better user adoption – invest in your people.

Want to learn more about Change Management?

Our on-demand webinar, Why Organizational Change Management is Critical to Digital Transformation, answers common questions, including:

• What exactly is change management?
• How does it work?
• Why is it so important for digital transformation?
• What benefits should I expect?
• What are the first steps I should take?

Like most people I’ve been swept up in Olympic fever, each night dutifully recording the coverage so that I can fast forward through the commercials. There have been many historic moments in the Olympic Games but the USA men’s and women’s hurdlers have provided some of the most exciting. For the first time ever the US women placed 1-2-3 in the 100m hurdles when Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali and Kristi Castlin finished with the gold, silver and bronze medals. Then Dalilah Muhammad and Kerron Clement took the gold medal in the women’s and men’s 400m hurdles respectively, an event that no American has ever won.

The USA’s Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali and Kristi Castlin celebrate after they won gold, silver and bronze in the women’s 100m hurdles final respectively. Photograph: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

At Perficient we have a long history of implementing intranet solutions for our customers, we recognize the challenges that you face. That is why we have built Rise, our intranet-as-a-service product that can effectively help you navigate the hurdles of your intranet deployment. The Rise team operates as an extension of your intranet team, providing a dedicated development and support team to ensure your ability to deliver on the vision you have set internally. Rise operates as an intranet-as-a-service making sure that we can meet your intranet needs today and for years to come as technology and trends shift. Rise puts your users at the center of an integrated Office 365 experience surfacing the right tools to enable your connected and collaborative workplace.

Learn more in our latest guide: Accelerate Your SharePoint Intranet with Rise.

 

Is it just me or does it seem like we’ve done this before? I began working with SharePoint with the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, lovingly (or not so lovingly) referred to as MOSS ’07, then came SharePoint Server 2010, and 2013, and now we’re at SharePoint 2016 and all feeling a little déjà vu. There has been a familiar pattern that has repeated itself over my career, it goes a little something like this:

Prospective Customer – “We’d like to build a new intranet, our old one used to be great but now it doesn’t really work very well anymore. We’d like to upgrade to the new SharePoint Server [insert version here], we’ve heard it solves world hunger and will get our coffee too!”
Consultant- “That sounds great, yes SharePoint Server [insert version here] is a great product and we can build you a great intranet, however we probably won’t solve world hunger and you may have to get your own coffee. Let’s start with understanding your requirements…”
4-6 months later…
Happy Customer – “This new intranet is great! It works really well and does almost everything I need, we should really look into that world hunger and coffee scenario next.”
3-5 years later…
Prospective Customer – “We’d like to build a new intranet, our old one used to be great but now it doesn’t really meet our needs. We’d like to upgrade to the new SharePoint Server [insert version here], maybe this time we can do that world hunger thing or at least the coffee!”

The simple truth is that keeping the intranet continuously relevant in any organization is a real challenge that can’t be addressed by a platform upgrade every 3-5 years.
With Office 365 and SharePoint Online it is now possible to do your organization’s final SharePoint Migration to SharePoint Online. With SharePoint Online Microsoft has upped the ante, instead of delivering value with a major on-premise release every few years, Microsoft has outlined a cloud-first, mobile-first roadmap for delivering value to SharePoint Online on a continuous basis with new features available every few months or sooner.
Microsoft has set the stage for innovation at a rapid pace with new and exciting features such as The SharePoint Framework, Flow and PowerApps, modern Team Sites, and more. All experiences that will first be made available in Office 365. This presents a new set of challenges to many organizations that traditionally invested in their intranet every 3-5 years. These companies are now being tasked by their users with how to take advantage of the new capabilities of Office 365 on a continuous basis. Many organizations are simply not equipped to handle that level of Organizational Change Management.
An Evergreen Approach to the Intranet
That is why we built Rise as an intranet-as-a-Service enabling the ability to provide continuous value through your organization’s intranet. Rise delivers an integrated Office 365 experience with all of the common intranet functionality available out of the box. Rise keeps up with the pace of innovation set by Microsoft allowing your users to take advantage of new capabilities in Office 365 faster. Rise delivers on a customer driven roadmap, operating as an extension of your team to help drive user adoption and intranet success.

Intranet value over time for custom solution as compared to a Rise Intranet

Sometimes Salesforce projects don’t stop, they slow down, sputter, and you can’t seem to get them restarted or firing on all cylinders. These projects aren’t always failures – they just need a thorough tune-up and clear path to get them back on the road. As such, below are the top reasons for a project stall and how to get them back on track and delivering success.

Tell Your Passengers to Buckle Up (Stakeholders)

The Diagnosis

The top reason for a Salesforce project stall is dwindling senior stakeholder involvement or lack thereof. Whether you are rolling out Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or a custom cloud solution on the Salesforce platform, your senior stakeholders hold the key to moving the project forward. As priorities change in an organization, from budget changes to new strategic initiatives, the major stakeholders will need to keep a steady grip on the project and provide support. Project stalls from stakeholders can be detrimental, as their buy-in (or lack thereof) can significantly affect the resources involved as well as future adoption by your business users.

The Fix

Ensuring stakeholder buy-in is both the most useful and most obvious solution to the problem. It is important to understand where the Salesforce project sits on the roadmap for the business and any potential roadblocks, potholes or speed bumps along the road. Is your organization a startup and planning for an IPO this year? Do you have any major changes in leadership, especially in those roles that can impact a Salesforce project (VP of Sales for Sales Cloud or VP of Service for Service Cloud)? Is your solution answering stakeholder specific questions? You will need to answer these questions before you can fix the solution.

One way that I have seen work is to identify the stakeholders who are blocking your path, and bring this to the attention of the steering committee or discuss it in a weekly status meeting. The intent behind this is not to make them feel targeted, but rather to expose an issue so that it can be managed collectively. Often stakeholder concerns surround a lack of acceptance for the vision with Salesforce or a lack of inclusion in decision making. Provide better visibility to the project, actively supporting their questions and make sure everyone is buckled up for the ride!

Check the Gas (Money)

The Diagnosis

Is your project funded appropriately?  Is the tank running dry but you have plenty of miles to go until you reach the finish line? These questions often plague many Salesforce projects, and the answers are not always simple. Project budgets are often set early on and have approval from fairly senior stakeholders, so going back to ask for more gas money can be a challenge or impossible. Also, when solutions start to get too complex, money can start to dwindle as consultants or other highly technical resources are pulled in to support the project. Although very technical resources are always a high profile cost, they are often necessary and should be reviewed within the entire project cost.

The Fix

Fixing a lack of funds can be difficult and will require a deep understanding of the solution that is stalling as well as a plan for what will be accomplished.  Some key areas to consider include:

• Get to your destination – what is the plan and how can I/we accelerate it to ensure budgets can cover it?
• Use experts wisely – are consultants being used on significant capability gaps, and if so, when will they complete their efforts? Also, has enough time for knowledge transfer been put in so that permanent employees can successfully manage the solution down the road?
• Strip it down – especially when implementing Salesforce, are there out-of-the-box components that will get the team to a successful go-live and sometimes the extra apps, new business processes, complex integrations can wait until Phase 2 to make their impact?

Don’t Forget to Get the Whole Car Inspected (Org Health Assessment)

The Diagnosis

Although budget and stakeholders are certainly the chief reasons why a project can stall, problems can be more systemic and need a holistic product approach to fixing it. Stopping a project and doing a diagnosis of why it isn’t progressing as hoped takes both determination and character, as the tendency to want to progress a project at all costs is an enticing one.

A project may also need to take a larger view of what it is attempting to solve as well as the environment it is operating in. Is the Sales Cloud attempting to deliver complex forecasts within a simple business model? Is the Service Cloud not integrated with a central ERP system that will inevitably be in conflict with it? These types of questions will need answers as well as solutions which may affect the total environment.

The Fix

An external Salesforce specific health check or assessment is one of the best ways to get a fresh perspective on the systemic issues that may be plaguing your project. Whether it is a simple license issue (using Professional Edition rather than Enterprise) or a complex integration (combining Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, CPQ and ERP systems) an assessment will layout both the issues and potential roadmap to get the project back on track.

Health assessments also perform another function, they support better stakeholder engagement and provide the validation to seek more budget.  Effectively fixing the two previous problems, the assessment will provide a view on the entire solution and give a high-level set of actions that senior stakeholders can put in to practice. Also, the set of actions can be effectively costed to provide the basis for greater investment.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, like a car, the project should reach its destination successfully by reducing the bumps along the way to ensure all passengers (users) are happy with the journey.  Don’t consider your Salesforce project a failure if it stalls, needs a jumpstart, or requires servicing to get it restarted. Reviewing the level of stakeholder engagement, managing the budget, and, if completely necessary, doing a tune-up or complete diagnosis, is where the rubber meets the road with Salesforce.

When deciding to rollout Salesforce, you probably went through the typical business case or business planning process.  This included looking at factors like the political, economic, financial and social ramifications of the move to a cloud platform with incredible capabilities to transform your business.  That said, when you’ve reached the final rollout, how closely aligned is your vision and the supporting details to the finished product?  The below four points attempt to demystify some of the peculiar differences we often find between a company’s business case for change, their vision for Salesforce and what is ultimately achieved.

Understanding the Value Drivers

Initially when looking at your business case you will have covered the four main value drivers for change:

• Political – what is the vision and overwhelming need for change and how long will the effort take to create this necessary change?
• Economic – what are the key performance indicators that need to be achieved or the monetary drivers for change?
• Financial – what is the budget to achieve this change and what is the structure around the budget (i.e. how the budget can be spent)?
• Social – what is the plan for ensuring successful user adoption and adaptation to new working practices?

Achieving Success with Salesforce

Having covered these areas in sufficient enough detail to give your project the best chance to succeed and match your vision, Salesforce implementations can still fall short.  The following areas have the highest potential for project success or failure, so here are four ways to set your Salesforce project up for success:

• Aligning with a vision – implementing Salesforce requires a keen vision for the future, regardless of the solution (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc.) and whether it is a new implementation or a migration from another platform. That vision needs to be actively communicated to the entire project team.  The team needs to understand their role in the success of that vision and how business value will be derived.
• Staying on budget – knowing projects can go over budget for many reasons, should allow you to track back to a reasonable financial case for change with awareness on all parts of the team. When reasonable budgets are provided with staff who understand their role in fulfilling those budgets, cost overruns are less likely.
• Achieving measurable results – setting goals that everyone can feel that they are helping to attain is important for achieving success with Salesforce. Metrics including user adoption rates, increases in leads, or decreases in cases are all quick measures of success throughout the first year of an effective Salesforce implementation.
• Planning for success – Planning early regardless of a pure waterfall or agile approach (or something in between) will ensure you have achieved the desired outcomes. Unlike other systems, Salesforce implementations can go quickly with benefits driven early, so project managers need to plan for this while being ready for any normal changes in timeline due to external factors (e.g. system integrations, data migration, etc.)

The key piece of advice to take away is to bring your team in early, including your consulting team who are implementing or advising on the solution, and share the business case or business planning that was agreed.  Salesforce projects should be approached with the same rigor as any other major IT or building project, even if the outcomes are quicker and potentially greater.  Getting the team involved early allows clear buy-in and will help you align your vision with the future business outcomes.

Trying to figure out what sessions to attend at Dreamforce can be one of the toughest things to do during one of the most exciting weeks of the year. And then there is just getting to the sessions on time in order to make the most of your week at this absolutely epic event. But one of my favorite types of sessions are the Circles of Success. These sessions focus on specific challenges in a round-table like environment and foster dialog and ideas between the participants. One of the participants today said for him these sessions are like therapy.

I had the opportunity to sit in a session titled “Weathering the Storm of Change Management” this morning. My table had participants from small local companies with a couple of hundred users to large global companies with thousands of users and many different Salesforce orgs. Despite the differences in scale, there was still a common challenge experienced by everyone at the table: how do we manage the chaos of change with a solution as easy to configure as Salesforce in a fast-paced business environment?

Our table focused on the challenge of user adoption. This topic alone really needs more than an hour’s discussion. It can often be one of the main contributors to a failed solution implementation. Nonetheless, it is an area of pain for nearly every organization, whether new to Salesforce or a longtime customer.

Many issues result from not having a solid user adoption strategy. Of course, the first thing we think about is people not using the system. But that is usually just a small part of it. Other issues that impact the health of the solution include quality of data issues, difficulty with onboarding new hires, solution knowledge and awareness, misplaced expectations, and in the big picture of all of this, a measurable negative impact to revenue.

User adoption is a science and an art. There are numerous books written on this topic as well as excellent blogs written by other Perficient authors on this site. But one key takeaway that came out of today’s discussion was drawing a distinction between Stick vs. Carrot approach. Both are necessary in a good user adoption strategy. But like everything else, there needs to be a balance between them.

Traditionally, the stick approach has been employed to drive use of a solution. The stick is often realized as the top-down-driven messaging of use the solution, “or else”. Perhaps not worded as strongly as that in most organizations. However, the idea is the same.

Often companies seek to drive adoption by leaning on the management and executive sponsors to create policy to state that all users are required to login and use the solution a certain way. While it’s important to have executive sponsorship helping to promote the use of the system, this should not be the only motivator strategy because it can lead to users finding the quickest and easiest way to enter what they have to in order to make sure they’ve met the minimum requirements of the policy’s expectations. The balance to the stick is the carrot.

The carrot is the “how does this benefit me” or “what’s in this for me” explanation that users are looking for when they are using Salesforce. Users need to find value in the solution beyond the requirement of entering data that seemingly provides no immediate and direct value to them. Consider the messaging to your users and leverage identifying areas that will improve their quality of life directly from the use of Salesforce.

For example:

Time Savings – Identify inefficient business processes and build solutions in Salesforce to address them thereby making it easier for users to get the same results in a fraction of the time.

• That paper form you had to use to create an account in the ERP has been deprecated and now everything can be entered through Salesforce.
• The excel sheet you used to have to fill out each week to communicate your forecast or pipeline numbers to your manager is no longer needed because we can pull that information from what you enter into your opportunities.
• The emails and phone calls and cat herding you had to do to get an approval for your quote can now be done by the push of a button.

Support through Motivation – Consider transparency to incentives and other strategies to help motivate users to want to use the system.

• Being able to see commissions real-time (or near it) on an opportunity or dashboard is a powerful incentivizer to promote desired behavior in a system.
• Use Apps to employ a points-based system tied to incentives to drive behavior. In the Circles of Success session, our table discussed using an Appexchange app called SuMo. There are several apps on the Appexchange that provide this kind of functionality. This particular app happened to be used by one of the participants very successfully. Using an App like SuMo you can drive behavior through goals in the solution and provide incentives around performance. This is often referred to as Gamification. You’ll find many articles online discussing strategies on this topic.

These are just a couple of strategies that we discussed during our session today. As I said, it just begins to scratch the surface of addressing User Adoption. I recommend exploring and reading more around User Adoption. Consider partnering with Perficient to help define a strategy, and be sure to include it as part of your overall Change Management strategy.